Improve your renders with reflection maps.

In my last Live-Training (in Italy), Alessandro Pellegrini made this wonderful Render:

This is the perfect image to say something about the Reflection Maps.

In the following image reflections are glossed. Leaks have been modeled in 3D, but the whole surface has just uniform reflections.

Here a detail of the scene: we can appreciate it a little bit more 🙂

But for aged wood simulation, uniform reflections is not the right solution. We need to controls the reflecions, making some points more reflective than others. The knots of the wood – for example – must reflect much less. This can easily be achieved by inserting another map in the ‘REFLECTION’ slot.

For this material we will use 2 simple maps:

1 – One in the Diffuse channel (where usually we have the classic textures)
2 – Another in the Reflecion channel

That’s how they look, just to figure out: (yes, yes .. after you download;-)

Of course you have to play with these parameters to find the right balance. Sometimes copying this maps also in RGlossiness and Bump channels is helpful. You just have to try and play around.

Usually, the reflection maps are ready to use in the materials in libraries you can buy online. They often have the suffix _refl or _reflection. If you want to create your own map by photoshop: start with black and white and increase contrast with levels and curves.

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Can not miss some advice to get crisp textures in renders:

For the final rendering, use the Adaptive DMC antialiasing (min / max – 1 / 16)

For each texture go into the channel and set Blur: 1.0 -> 0.5 (or less)

For each texture go into the channel and set: Filtering > summed area (or none)

39 Responses

Hey CG Blog… Its one of those best tutorials I have been looking for… Thank you very much for this tutorial… Here is my Facebook page totally dedicated for VRay… http://www.facebook.com/vraypage I have shared this tutorial on my profile and now would be posting it on the page. I hope you would not be offended with that and I am not stealing your work… Any way, thanks a tonne for this tutorial man… You rock, One of my favorite internet teacherss….

As perfect in all technical aspects as it is , this rendering seems a bit flat to me .. Kinda lacks “depth” , especially the top part of bookshelves which, in my opinion have too much light ..Yet , reflection tutorial , as always , perfect and detailed to the last bit ..

Wow this is nice! But I would like to know also what apropriate sizes of image(jpeg) I can use in an object. Because i saw some tutorials like the archviz, they use different kinds of texture sizes, depends on their object sizes. I haven’t seen any tutorials explaining about this.